President Muhammadu Buhari has promised that his regime will do its best to reach all Nigerian students, wherever they are, with quality, inclusive learning and skills development opportunities to prepare them for the bright future they deserve.

Mr Buhari stated this on Monday while making a statement on ‘Thematic Session four: Digital Transformation of Education at a three-day Transforming Education Summit’ in New York.

The summit was organised on the margins of the 77th session of the UN General Assembly.

According to the Nigerian leader, over 50 per cent of Nigeria’s 200 million plus population is made up of people below the age of 20, who have developed an appetite and savviness for everything digital.

“The emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic brought transformations that led to the adoption of digital learning options. Nigeria leveraged the long closure of schools during COVID-19 and the continual disruption of schools due to insecurity and climate change to expand digital learning and ensure continuity of learning,” Mr Buhari explained. “This enabled government to specifically target out-of-school children, and children in difficult-to-reach areas with digital learning opportunities.”

He further noted that the progress in digital learning was guided by the development of the national digital learning policy, which focuses on the long-term vision of inclusive digital transformation by increasing public provisioning for digital learning.

He said it also guided the development and rollout of free, open-source digital tools to provide large-scale remote learning with online content complemented by TV and radio programmes as well as print materials for home use.

“Through the Nigeria Learning Passport, a digital learning platform launched by the federal ministry of education in partnership with UNICEF, teachers and learners have online and mobile access to almost 15,000 curriculum-mapped educational content that has been reviewed and vetted by a 35-member strong review team,” the president disclosed.

(NAN)